!!!: Monday, June 3

How does a veteran dance band get out of a lull? Easy: Dance harder.

!!! - Image Courtesy of Warp Records

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When !!! first undulated out of Northern
California in the late 1990s, the underground hadn’t yet gotten its
groove back. Disco was still a dirty word, the phrase “four on the
floor” verboten. Punks didn’t dance unless it meant they could leave
bruises on their partners, and indie rock was still slouching, inertly,
toward slackerdom. Emerging from Sacramento, of all places, playing
music rooted equally in the jagged funk of post-punk and the rubbery
rhythms of actual funk, the band—whose name, as must always be
mentioned, is most commonly pronounced “chk-chk chk”—felt like it was
doing something radical, if not downright revolutionary. Naturally, that
gave its members a bit of a complex.

In retrospect, Offer
acknowledges how snobby that sounds. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t true,
though. It’s still true now. Few of its peers are as dedicated to the
purity of the groove. LCD Soundsystem may have earned Band of a
Generation status from critics, but James Murphy approached his brand of
dance rock with ironic detachment. Even Daft Punk hides behind light-up
pyramids and big concepts. For !!!, the only concept it’s ever operated
under is that music should loosen inhibitions, and the group has never
hidden enthusiasm for its own party—particularly live, with Offer, clad
in short shorts, bounding through the crowd, locked in a fit of
stream-of-consciousness twitching and voguing.

Going into the
recording of its fifth album, though, !!! found itself in a bit of a
rut. With each successive record since its 2001 debut, the group has
gradually sanded down the “punk” half of its dance-punk genre tag,
attempting to mold itself into, simply, a great dance band. With 2010’s Strange Weather, Isn’t It?,
it finally seemed to get there, producing an album that pulsed with the
persistent throb of a transcendent DJ set. But the response, from
critics and fans, was tepid.

“I knew every nook
and cranny of that record,” Offer says. “We were really proud of it. I
don’t know why people didn’t respond to those songs. Therein lies the
rut.”

To dig itself out,
the band felt it had to, in a way, start over. One way of doing that was
to hire Jim Eno, Spoon’s drummer and in-house producer, to help it
realize the ideas it couldn’t quite achieve on its own. Titling the new
album Thr!!!er seems brashly iconoclastic, but the appropriation
is more than a cheeky joke: Trying on a few fresh grooves, like the cool
strut of “Even When the Water’s Cold” and the New Wave stomp of “Fine
Fine Fine,” while knocking out more familiar ones with even sharper
confidence, this is the record—as its namesake was to the career of its
creator—that all previous !!! records were building toward.

Offer feels the same.
He doesn’t call it a reinvention necessarily. It’s just that, after 16
years of practice, the band is finally living up to its youthful
swagger.

“We had to do a left
turn before we could take a right turn with certain things,” he says.
“Other things are stuff we’ve gotten better at nailing. But we always
wanted to make a record this funky, and now we have.”